Tests of Merit:
Tears of Snow
As the planet of Fellinus VII filled the forward view screen of the Tiden Freighter Cat's Claw, I gave a toothy grin as I gazed upon the world that had been my birthplace and home for most of my twenty-three years. It had been too long since I'd last been home, and I'd missed my war-torn planet more than I would have thought possible even if I had been gone longer than almost four months. It was too bad that I was here on official Guild business and not a vacation, but I had quickly accepted that vacation was a word that typically wasn't in a bounty hunter's vocabulary...at least not if he wanted to make a name for himself that is.
I reached down to retrieve the data tape that I'd been given by Tactician Oxxider before leaving Daichi's base, wondering why I was to be briefed by recorded message before reaching the planet instead of in person before leaving as was the norm on most missions. I didn't waste too much time pondering the question before shrugging and placing the disk into a player and settling back to see just what I was supposed to do during his short visit home. Oxxider had been told that it involved my people, which was why they were sending me to do it, and that it was important; it looks like I was about to find out if that was true or not.
The first thing that appeared was not the Tactician's face, or a text description of the mission, but a prompt asking for both the ID and password of the person viewing the message. I promptly entered both into a keypad and hit the enter key, at least a little reassured about the importance of the mission if it was password-protected. It quickly checked the entered data, and brought up an image of Tactician Oxxider on a screen in front of me as my ship continued on towards his home planet.
"Greetings Hunter NightKlaw; I hope that when you're viewing this you're nearing the planet Fellinus VII. Otherwise you will be promptly shot upon returning to base, for disobeying an order, but you got to do the job either way or you'll be shot for failing to complete a mission." Lord Oxxider said, laughing at what he considered to be a joke but I thought was a very serious matter; it was my life that was being threatened after all. "This mission involves the Felinoid race, as you've been told, and we felt that it would be best to send a Felinoid there to check it out. You got job for the obvious reason; you're the only Felinoid to join the Bounty Hunters Guild at the moment. Here's the mission.
"There's a faction of the War Dancer Clan, which you're a part of, that is planning a revolt against the limited Imperial presence on both of the Felinoid home worlds. It's believed that the faction is trying to expand its influence in both the War Dancer Clan and the normal Felinoid military, in order to gain the soldiers the rebellion's leaders thinks it'll need to win the war quicker, and the Empire wants us to make sure that rebellion never comes to pass. The factions being run by a pair of Felinoids, high up in the hierarchy of the War Dancer Clan, and they're the only things keeping this rebellion talk going. Your job, if you haven't guessed by now, is to kill the leaders of the rebellion. You will be expected to turn in proof of you completing your mission in order to obtain your credits, but you should have expected that for a dead only mission. These are your targets: SylverFire and SnowKlaw of the Eighteenth War Dancer Division."
Almost as soon as the Tactician named to two people that would be my targets their pictures replaced the image of Oxxider, but I didn't need to look at the side-by-side images to know what my prey looked like. I had to consciously force myself to not turn away from the screen, to look if only for some foolish hope that the pair I was supposed to kill wasn't who I knew they were, but those hopes and dreams were dashed as soon as my brain allowed me to realize just what I was looking at. The two people I were to kill were the two people I had thought they were, even if they had transferred from the Twenty-first War Dancer Division to the Eighteenth sometime after I left the planet.
SylverFire was a male Felinoid almost as tall as I am, his body fur a mixture of silver and fire red, and was firmly muscled from the tips of his ears to the points of his feet. He was incredibly strong, stronger than I was by far when I left to join the Bounty Hunters Guild, and often showed that off by sticking to melee combat instead of using projectile weapons of any kind. He was a friend of mine, one of the few that I had allowed myself on my quest for revenge against the Dogmians, and I almost considered him to be a brother. It would be hard to go against that sense of kinship to kill him, to kill the man that had saved my life countless times in the past.
If it was going to be hard to kill SylverFire because he was my friend and almost brother, then it was going to be several times harder to kill the completely white female Felinoid that went by the name of SnowKlaw. The reason for that wasn't that she was a friend, even though we are both very good friends to each other, but that she was my fiancée and we were supposed to be wed in two months. I had requested leave of duty to do so, but it appears that I am going to have to retract that leave if I complete this task I mean, it's hard to marry a woman that you've killed no matter how much you loved her.
I slumped down in my chair as I pondered what I should do about this mess I had somehow managed to get myself in this mess, even if it hadn't been intentional on my part. I didn't know if it really wasn't intentional of the Commission to have me kill old friends of mine as a show of loyalty, and I didn't know if I would be able to do what the Guild's Commission has sent me to do when the time came. This was a friend and a lover that I was to kill, not some person I had no history with, and I had to make a decision if love was more important than the money I was going to be paid for doing this mission and my position as an Assistant Journeyman in the BHG.
Love or money. Family or the Guild. NightKlaw of Fellinus VII or Hunter NightKlaw of Daichi Kabal. Questions that I had known on a logical level that I was going to eventually have to answer, but I had no clue that I was going to have to answer them so soon. I had hoped that it would have been years before I was forced to decide between the Bounty Hunters Guild and the life that I had lived during my life on the planet of Fellinus VII, but it looked like the time for me to answer these questions a lot sooner than I had hoped and, to a lesser extent, than I had feared.
The answers to the question of which was more important, love or money, would determine the path that my life was going to take for the rest of my life. If I choose to put love and family over money and the Guild, then I could be potentially slitting the throat of my career as a bounty hunter at most or at least severely limiting how far I would advance within its ranks. But, should I choose money over love, then I would be essentially condemning myself to a love devoid of the presence of at least one man I considered to be a brother and the one woman I loved with all of my scarred heart, and possibly even more people I cared about to various degrees by the time I chose to either quit the Guild or was retired by Death's icy embrace.
This was going to take a lot of thought and consideration on my part; I hoped I had enough time left to decide upon an answer before I reached my home world. And, for a reason that I knew extremely well, the thought of returning home was no longer as pleasing a thing as it had been a few minutes ago.
I tried to smile as I was warmly welcomed into the home of SnowKlaw and SylverFire, noting with a sense of fleeting pleasure that they were still living in the home that I had bought for them before leaving to join the Bounty Hunters Guild. They were obviously happy to see me, not at all bothered by the suddenness of my arrival, and the fact that they were so eager to welcome me into the home that I had bought them was an arrow that pierced my heart. They either had no idea why I had come here for, or they were confident that I could not do it if they did know, but I had no idea which one was correct and really had no desire to know which was true.
As SnowKlaw settled me into a chair in the living area of the house, I found myself doing my best to etch their features into my memory should they not take the option that I intended to give them. As the beautiful Felinoid woman moved to get us drinks, I stopped her with a light hand upon her arm before gesturing to her to take a chair. I wanted to get this over with as quickly as I could, so that I could try to get on with my life as best as I could.
"As much as I wish I could say otherwise, I did not come here for personal matters but for business from the Bounty Hunter Guild." I said, taking a deep breath to try to ease my frayed nerves that hadn't any more this time than the other times I'd done the same thing before. "The Empire knows of the revolt you're planning, and they told the Guild to stop it, and."
"Your leaders told you to stop us. Are we to be arrested and handed over to the Empire?" SylverFire asked, voice now tight and closed, and the fact that he hadn't denied it left an icy fear in my chest the hope that my two friends weren't involved in the rebellion had lived scant moments earlier.
"You are supposed to be killed, to remove the head of the snake so to speak before it becomes a danger. I have an offer, though, that may let you keep your heads. I..."
"No, no offers. We want the Empire off of Fellinus VII and VIII, and we're not embarrassed about our part in the rebellion. You are here to kill us for that part, and I will not hide out of shame in order to save my neck." SylverFire interrupted, his voice hard and cold as he refused my offer without even hearing it.
I desperately turned toward SnowKlaw, hoping against hope that she would at least hear me out, but that died a quick death as she deliberate shook her head in a firm no. "I agree with SylverFire, Night, and will die for my cause like I told my followers I would if I had to. I wish it didn't have to be this way, not that I am afraid of dying for what I believe in but that I don't want you to be the one to have to kill us."
"No fear of that, because I can't do it. I was giving you an option to hide the fact that I can't force myself to kill you two, and I still can't." I sighed, rising to my feet slowly. "I'll be going now; if I wait until I get back to Daichi Headquarters to tell them I failed then it should give you time to get ready for whoever they send to do what I couldn't."
I turn to leave, only to hear a pair of angry growls that I quickly identified as the sounds my two friends made when angry. I quickly turned to look at them again, only to see them draw weapons from their clothing that I hadn't even noticed in my eagerness to see them. They stood up and slowly moved towards me, even as my sixth sense started to scream at me that something important was about to happen in the next few moments.
"What's going on, guys?" I asked nervously, as I slowly backed away from the two other Felinoids in the room.
Neither Felinoid answered me with words; they simply leapt at me with loud war cries. I tried to over power them without hurting them, but my actions was hindering my efforts in fighting them out and allowed them to score more hits on me than I got on them. Finally, sorrowfully, I had to make a decision to use lethal force against them if I was going to make it out of here alive, so I threw the pair away from me even as I deftly drew my Desert Eagle pistol from its holster and put a bullet into each of them.
I watched as the two Felinoids that were once my closest friends fell to the ground dead, and had to suddenly fight off the tears that were threatening to fall at the sight of the two people I loved most in the world lying dead on the bloodied floor of the building I had bought as a gift for them. I slowly approached the limp form of SnowKlaw and knelt next to her bloodied white form, tears blurring my eyesight despite my best efforts to keep those tears from falling. I reached down to stroke her cheek softly a few times, whimpering wordless pleas to her and SylverFire to forgive me for doing what I had done to them, and wondering just how long it would take for this event to start to circulate in the nightmares that prevent me from ever having peaceful sleep.
I gave another sigh and gathered the evidence I needed to prove that I had done what I had been sent to do, but stopped by the cold form of SnowKlaw once more. I gave the already stiffening body a quick hug, doing my best to ignore her coldness and the unnatural stiffness her body was gaining, and gave her one last kiss before leaving the building to head to my ship. I had made a decision over love or money, about which was more important to me, but the decision I had made had been relatively useless in the end.
I had chosen love over money, and had been prepared to live the rest of my life with the results of that decision if the Guild had learned that I really hadn't killed SylverFire and SnowKlaw. But when it came down to life or death for me, I had quickly chosen that I wanted to live. I don't know if I can live with the results of that decision, of the one that my life was more important than the ones of my friends, and I doubt I'll ever know for certain.
Maybe, when I know the answer to that question, I can look myself in the eyes and tell myself that the decision I had made hadn't been motivated at least partially by a love for money that was stronger than my love for them and convince myself that the lie is true.
NightKlaw (Aranlassar)
Disclaimer: Like I said in the last "Tests of Merit", I don't own Star Wars and/or the Bounty Hunters Guild and related topics. NightKlaw, SnowKlaw, SylverFire, the Cat's Claw, the War Dancer Clan(as far as I know anyways) and the Felinoid race are still mine to do with as I wish. Oxxider does not belong to me, he belongs to himself and only himself.
Notes: This is the response to the Writing Competition of the Fourteenth KAGs, where the topic was quite simply "Love or Money". I took it as a challenge to write rather love or money was more important to my character, as that was the only thing I thought they could have been asking for, and decided to put NightKlaw in a position where he would have to choose money (and duty to the BHG) over his love for a friend/brother and his would-be mate. This was actually hard for me to write, and I didn't really know how it would turn out until the very end. This technically won me third place in the event, because it was a tie between me and another hunter, but I like to say that I won second because it strokes my ego and my ego can use all the boosts it can get.
Tears of Snow
As the planet of Fellinus VII filled the forward view screen of the Tiden Freighter Cat's Claw, I gave a toothy grin as I gazed upon the world that had been my birthplace and home for most of my twenty-three years. It had been too long since I'd last been home, and I'd missed my war-torn planet more than I would have thought possible even if I had been gone longer than almost four months. It was too bad that I was here on official Guild business and not a vacation, but I had quickly accepted that vacation was a word that typically wasn't in a bounty hunter's vocabulary...at least not if he wanted to make a name for himself that is.
I reached down to retrieve the data tape that I'd been given by Tactician Oxxider before leaving Daichi's base, wondering why I was to be briefed by recorded message before reaching the planet instead of in person before leaving as was the norm on most missions. I didn't waste too much time pondering the question before shrugging and placing the disk into a player and settling back to see just what I was supposed to do during his short visit home. Oxxider had been told that it involved my people, which was why they were sending me to do it, and that it was important; it looks like I was about to find out if that was true or not.
The first thing that appeared was not the Tactician's face, or a text description of the mission, but a prompt asking for both the ID and password of the person viewing the message. I promptly entered both into a keypad and hit the enter key, at least a little reassured about the importance of the mission if it was password-protected. It quickly checked the entered data, and brought up an image of Tactician Oxxider on a screen in front of me as my ship continued on towards his home planet.
"Greetings Hunter NightKlaw; I hope that when you're viewing this you're nearing the planet Fellinus VII. Otherwise you will be promptly shot upon returning to base, for disobeying an order, but you got to do the job either way or you'll be shot for failing to complete a mission." Lord Oxxider said, laughing at what he considered to be a joke but I thought was a very serious matter; it was my life that was being threatened after all. "This mission involves the Felinoid race, as you've been told, and we felt that it would be best to send a Felinoid there to check it out. You got job for the obvious reason; you're the only Felinoid to join the Bounty Hunters Guild at the moment. Here's the mission.
"There's a faction of the War Dancer Clan, which you're a part of, that is planning a revolt against the limited Imperial presence on both of the Felinoid home worlds. It's believed that the faction is trying to expand its influence in both the War Dancer Clan and the normal Felinoid military, in order to gain the soldiers the rebellion's leaders thinks it'll need to win the war quicker, and the Empire wants us to make sure that rebellion never comes to pass. The factions being run by a pair of Felinoids, high up in the hierarchy of the War Dancer Clan, and they're the only things keeping this rebellion talk going. Your job, if you haven't guessed by now, is to kill the leaders of the rebellion. You will be expected to turn in proof of you completing your mission in order to obtain your credits, but you should have expected that for a dead only mission. These are your targets: SylverFire and SnowKlaw of the Eighteenth War Dancer Division."
Almost as soon as the Tactician named to two people that would be my targets their pictures replaced the image of Oxxider, but I didn't need to look at the side-by-side images to know what my prey looked like. I had to consciously force myself to not turn away from the screen, to look if only for some foolish hope that the pair I was supposed to kill wasn't who I knew they were, but those hopes and dreams were dashed as soon as my brain allowed me to realize just what I was looking at. The two people I were to kill were the two people I had thought they were, even if they had transferred from the Twenty-first War Dancer Division to the Eighteenth sometime after I left the planet.
SylverFire was a male Felinoid almost as tall as I am, his body fur a mixture of silver and fire red, and was firmly muscled from the tips of his ears to the points of his feet. He was incredibly strong, stronger than I was by far when I left to join the Bounty Hunters Guild, and often showed that off by sticking to melee combat instead of using projectile weapons of any kind. He was a friend of mine, one of the few that I had allowed myself on my quest for revenge against the Dogmians, and I almost considered him to be a brother. It would be hard to go against that sense of kinship to kill him, to kill the man that had saved my life countless times in the past.
If it was going to be hard to kill SylverFire because he was my friend and almost brother, then it was going to be several times harder to kill the completely white female Felinoid that went by the name of SnowKlaw. The reason for that wasn't that she was a friend, even though we are both very good friends to each other, but that she was my fiancée and we were supposed to be wed in two months. I had requested leave of duty to do so, but it appears that I am going to have to retract that leave if I complete this task I mean, it's hard to marry a woman that you've killed no matter how much you loved her.
I slumped down in my chair as I pondered what I should do about this mess I had somehow managed to get myself in this mess, even if it hadn't been intentional on my part. I didn't know if it really wasn't intentional of the Commission to have me kill old friends of mine as a show of loyalty, and I didn't know if I would be able to do what the Guild's Commission has sent me to do when the time came. This was a friend and a lover that I was to kill, not some person I had no history with, and I had to make a decision if love was more important than the money I was going to be paid for doing this mission and my position as an Assistant Journeyman in the BHG.
Love or money. Family or the Guild. NightKlaw of Fellinus VII or Hunter NightKlaw of Daichi Kabal. Questions that I had known on a logical level that I was going to eventually have to answer, but I had no clue that I was going to have to answer them so soon. I had hoped that it would have been years before I was forced to decide between the Bounty Hunters Guild and the life that I had lived during my life on the planet of Fellinus VII, but it looked like the time for me to answer these questions a lot sooner than I had hoped and, to a lesser extent, than I had feared.
The answers to the question of which was more important, love or money, would determine the path that my life was going to take for the rest of my life. If I choose to put love and family over money and the Guild, then I could be potentially slitting the throat of my career as a bounty hunter at most or at least severely limiting how far I would advance within its ranks. But, should I choose money over love, then I would be essentially condemning myself to a love devoid of the presence of at least one man I considered to be a brother and the one woman I loved with all of my scarred heart, and possibly even more people I cared about to various degrees by the time I chose to either quit the Guild or was retired by Death's icy embrace.
This was going to take a lot of thought and consideration on my part; I hoped I had enough time left to decide upon an answer before I reached my home world. And, for a reason that I knew extremely well, the thought of returning home was no longer as pleasing a thing as it had been a few minutes ago.
I tried to smile as I was warmly welcomed into the home of SnowKlaw and SylverFire, noting with a sense of fleeting pleasure that they were still living in the home that I had bought for them before leaving to join the Bounty Hunters Guild. They were obviously happy to see me, not at all bothered by the suddenness of my arrival, and the fact that they were so eager to welcome me into the home that I had bought them was an arrow that pierced my heart. They either had no idea why I had come here for, or they were confident that I could not do it if they did know, but I had no idea which one was correct and really had no desire to know which was true.
As SnowKlaw settled me into a chair in the living area of the house, I found myself doing my best to etch their features into my memory should they not take the option that I intended to give them. As the beautiful Felinoid woman moved to get us drinks, I stopped her with a light hand upon her arm before gesturing to her to take a chair. I wanted to get this over with as quickly as I could, so that I could try to get on with my life as best as I could.
"As much as I wish I could say otherwise, I did not come here for personal matters but for business from the Bounty Hunter Guild." I said, taking a deep breath to try to ease my frayed nerves that hadn't any more this time than the other times I'd done the same thing before. "The Empire knows of the revolt you're planning, and they told the Guild to stop it, and."
"Your leaders told you to stop us. Are we to be arrested and handed over to the Empire?" SylverFire asked, voice now tight and closed, and the fact that he hadn't denied it left an icy fear in my chest the hope that my two friends weren't involved in the rebellion had lived scant moments earlier.
"You are supposed to be killed, to remove the head of the snake so to speak before it becomes a danger. I have an offer, though, that may let you keep your heads. I..."
"No, no offers. We want the Empire off of Fellinus VII and VIII, and we're not embarrassed about our part in the rebellion. You are here to kill us for that part, and I will not hide out of shame in order to save my neck." SylverFire interrupted, his voice hard and cold as he refused my offer without even hearing it.
I desperately turned toward SnowKlaw, hoping against hope that she would at least hear me out, but that died a quick death as she deliberate shook her head in a firm no. "I agree with SylverFire, Night, and will die for my cause like I told my followers I would if I had to. I wish it didn't have to be this way, not that I am afraid of dying for what I believe in but that I don't want you to be the one to have to kill us."
"No fear of that, because I can't do it. I was giving you an option to hide the fact that I can't force myself to kill you two, and I still can't." I sighed, rising to my feet slowly. "I'll be going now; if I wait until I get back to Daichi Headquarters to tell them I failed then it should give you time to get ready for whoever they send to do what I couldn't."
I turn to leave, only to hear a pair of angry growls that I quickly identified as the sounds my two friends made when angry. I quickly turned to look at them again, only to see them draw weapons from their clothing that I hadn't even noticed in my eagerness to see them. They stood up and slowly moved towards me, even as my sixth sense started to scream at me that something important was about to happen in the next few moments.
"What's going on, guys?" I asked nervously, as I slowly backed away from the two other Felinoids in the room.
Neither Felinoid answered me with words; they simply leapt at me with loud war cries. I tried to over power them without hurting them, but my actions was hindering my efforts in fighting them out and allowed them to score more hits on me than I got on them. Finally, sorrowfully, I had to make a decision to use lethal force against them if I was going to make it out of here alive, so I threw the pair away from me even as I deftly drew my Desert Eagle pistol from its holster and put a bullet into each of them.
I watched as the two Felinoids that were once my closest friends fell to the ground dead, and had to suddenly fight off the tears that were threatening to fall at the sight of the two people I loved most in the world lying dead on the bloodied floor of the building I had bought as a gift for them. I slowly approached the limp form of SnowKlaw and knelt next to her bloodied white form, tears blurring my eyesight despite my best efforts to keep those tears from falling. I reached down to stroke her cheek softly a few times, whimpering wordless pleas to her and SylverFire to forgive me for doing what I had done to them, and wondering just how long it would take for this event to start to circulate in the nightmares that prevent me from ever having peaceful sleep.
I gave another sigh and gathered the evidence I needed to prove that I had done what I had been sent to do, but stopped by the cold form of SnowKlaw once more. I gave the already stiffening body a quick hug, doing my best to ignore her coldness and the unnatural stiffness her body was gaining, and gave her one last kiss before leaving the building to head to my ship. I had made a decision over love or money, about which was more important to me, but the decision I had made had been relatively useless in the end.
I had chosen love over money, and had been prepared to live the rest of my life with the results of that decision if the Guild had learned that I really hadn't killed SylverFire and SnowKlaw. But when it came down to life or death for me, I had quickly chosen that I wanted to live. I don't know if I can live with the results of that decision, of the one that my life was more important than the ones of my friends, and I doubt I'll ever know for certain.
Maybe, when I know the answer to that question, I can look myself in the eyes and tell myself that the decision I had made hadn't been motivated at least partially by a love for money that was stronger than my love for them and convince myself that the lie is true.
NightKlaw (Aranlassar)
Disclaimer: Like I said in the last "Tests of Merit", I don't own Star Wars and/or the Bounty Hunters Guild and related topics. NightKlaw, SnowKlaw, SylverFire, the Cat's Claw, the War Dancer Clan(as far as I know anyways) and the Felinoid race are still mine to do with as I wish. Oxxider does not belong to me, he belongs to himself and only himself.
Notes: This is the response to the Writing Competition of the Fourteenth KAGs, where the topic was quite simply "Love or Money". I took it as a challenge to write rather love or money was more important to my character, as that was the only thing I thought they could have been asking for, and decided to put NightKlaw in a position where he would have to choose money (and duty to the BHG) over his love for a friend/brother and his would-be mate. This was actually hard for me to write, and I didn't really know how it would turn out until the very end. This technically won me third place in the event, because it was a tie between me and another hunter, but I like to say that I won second because it strokes my ego and my ego can use all the boosts it can get.
